Although the Internet traces back to the late 1960s, the widespread availability and acceptance of personal computing and internetworking have resulted in the explosive growth and unprecedented advances in information sharing technologies. In particular, the Worldwide Web (“Web”) has revolutionized accessibility to untold volumes of information in stored electronic form to a worldwide audience, including written, spoken (audio) and visual (imagery and video) information, both in archived and real-time formats. In short, the Web has provided desktop access to every connected user to a virtually unlimited library of information in almost every language worldwide.
Information exchange on the Web operates under a client-server model. Individual clients execute Web content retrieval and presentation applications, typically in the form of Web browsers. The Web browsers send request messages for Web content to centralized Web servers, which function as data storage and retrieval repositories. The Web servers parse the request messages and return the requested Web content in response messages.
Search engines have evolved in tempo with the increased usage of the Web to enable users to find and retrieve relevant Web content in an efficient and timely manner. As the amount and types of Web content has increased, the sophistication and accuracy of search engines has likewise improved. Generally, search engines strive to provide the highest quality results in response to a search query. However, determining quality is difficult, as the relevance of retrieved Web content is inherently subjective and dependent upon the interests, knowledge and attitudes of the user.
Existing methods used by search engines are based on matching search query terms to terms indexed from Web pages. More advanced methods determine the importance of retrieved Web content using, for example, a hyperlink structure-based analysis, such as described in S. Brin and L. Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” (1998) and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999, issued Sep. 4, 2001 to Page, the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference.
A typical search query scenario begins with either a natural language question or individual terms, often in the form of keywords, being submitted to a search engine. The search engine executes a search against a data repository describing information characteristics of potentially retrievable Web content and identifies the candidate Web pages. Searches can often return thousands or even millions of results, so most search engines typically rank or score only a subset of the most promising results. The top Web pages are then presented to the user, usually in the form of Web content titles, hyperlinks, and other descriptive information, such as snippets of text taken from the Web pages.
Providing quality search results is complicated by several factors. First, a given search query can often be expressed in multiple forms based on the individual terms, which constitute the search query. For instance, a particular term may have synonyms, alternate spellings, share a common root form, or have a semantic meaning similar to other words. Likewise, a particular term may share a conceptual meaning with other related words. Moreover, an individual term could be part of a compound term, which, when combined with one or more other terms, may also have multiple forms.
In addition, the choice of terms selected by a user submitting a search query can affect search result quality. A user may simply fail to realize the scope of the search and could provide a set of individual terms that inadvertently limit the search to a portion of potentially responsive results. Similarly, the user could possess a limited vocabulary due to, for instance, an unfamiliarity with the subject matter of the search, and consequently poorly frame or even mischaracterize the query. Finally, the user might misunderstand the techniques employed by a particular search engine and provide terms that are ill-suited to the search engine.
Accordingly, there is a need for an approach to broadening a search query. Broadening search characteristics may be used, such as synonyms, alternate spellings, terms that share a common root form, or have a semantic meaning similar to other words, as well as search characteristics that share a conceptual meaning with other related words. The broadened search scope can result in increased search quality.
There is a further need for an approach to providing a user interface presenting broadened search queries. In one example, individual search characteristics occurring as part of a compound term would be identified and considered when providing one or more broadening search characteristics. Such broadened search characteristics may be flexibly presented to the user in multiple display formats.